Views from Around the World

Our industry is filled with metrics. We have guidelines, goals and targets for seemingly everything, from system uptime to lines of code per day. As vendors and partners we spend a lot of time discovering the key metrics and building our solutions to fit.

Our customers see something different. It’s their contention that metrics are interesting, but not really relevant in the real world. What matters more to them is the measurement of how the achievements of metrics change things for their business.

What does five nines of uptime mean? It looks pretty in an ad, and certainly sounds very important, but it’s really only useful when we measure the impact of achievement, or failure to achieve. In a recent conversation, I learned that while we may not think much of a performance delivery difference of one millisecond (a metric), that one millisecond could have a fiscal impact of several million dollars to a specific customer (the measurement).

Here’s how we can change the face of the conversation with the customer and also begin to affect how they see us as a company. Customers will pay for value. They say so. If the solutions from different companies appear to offer the customer similar value, vendor selection can be skewed by existing agreements and past performance, leading to choices that in the long term may not be optimal for the customer. If instead of focusing on the metric conversations, we choose to ask the questions about what the achievement, or miss, of metrics means to the customer’s business and then position our solution in the context of a tangible measurement that is aligned to the customer’s business deliverables we create differentiation. Not only is this selling, it’s the hallmark of amazing service. Our customers may like or even love our technology, but until we can help them show how we create measurable value, our job isn’t done.

Let me share another example. If you were the CIO of a potential customer, which statement would you be more inclined to listen to?

With the XYZ offering we are saving operational expense, increasing user productivity and decreasing the timelines of our virtualization projects.

With the XYZ offering, we have been able to reduce our operational expense in our virtualization projects by 3.2%, add a productive hour per week to each consumer of the service and reduce on average the timeline to deliver on projects by 5.5%

Both are wonderful statements, but the second one has more resonance because the measurements are relevant in the context of that customer’s business. Moreover, a prospect reading that kind of quantitative success story is more likely to see value in it because there is an implication that similar quantitative data would apply in their situation. If as part of developing our proposal we can determine these key measurements and make them success criteria, we change the game for our customers and by extension for ourselves.

Cheers until next time